Beware the Calends of April

[kevin_standlee]

Because I don't think everyone reading this is also reading debgeisler's journal (although you should), here's a link to the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time.

Thanks to fine hoaxes like these, no sane person will issue a legitimate news story on the first day of April. Every now and then, I've see groups in Fandom forget the date and issue a real announcement that day. Sometimes the announcements are so odd that people assume that they must be hoaxes.

Comments

[johno.livejournal.com]

KFOG's all 70s all the time format change was my favorite April fools day prank.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

I forget which of the two Bay Area alternative/modern rock stations did it, but a few years ago for 4/1 one of them became KGAY and played showtunes, Judy Garland, etc.

[kshandra]

It was Live 105, and they've been doing K-GAY weekend for Pride on a regular basis since then.

[redneckotaku.livejournal.com]

Anime on DVD bans people who put up hoax anime stories on April Fools day. The ban lasts for a week. Lest it be that April 1st is the worst day to announce a schedule. New York Comic Con should be announcing their schedule on that day. When will people learn not to announce any news on April 1st.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Google announced GMail on 4/1, and then spent the rest of the day responding to "You're not serious, are you?" queries (by now, people may have forgotten how major email with (then) 2 GB of storage was compared to existing webmail, so the reaction wasn't just to Google announcing a webmail product, but announcing one so far beyond existing ones).

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

When I was in college, so this would have been 1985-1989 -- and I'm pretty sure it wasn't 1989, the University of New Mexico Daily Lobo produced their annual hoax filled edition with the note that one story was real. A couple of days later they had to run an apology to the subject of the one real story, since nobody recognized it as a hoax.

Another year, purely by coincidence, April 1st happened to be the day that Bloom County featured the revealing of the Billy and the Boinger's world tour: one stop at the Motel 6 in Albuquerque; just a few blocks North of the UNM campus. A major front page article was on the upcoming concert.

Of course this also reminds me of the guy I worked with for a few years in college. He was the ad manager for the Lobo, and got the idea to run a page of vintage ads for existing businesses on April 1st, and did very well by both the paper and the businesses.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Ronald Reagan was shot on March 30th. (27 years ago today.) Anybody who didn't get the news for a couple of days might have been very confused.

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

Seems to me last year's Hugo committee made the (necessary) mistake of making an announcement on April 1.